I didn't include 2p bonus or T&C into it because you simply cannot guarantee that they are -always- up. Stagger/shuffle for my monk is *always* up. I didn't include my monk's 2p in it either which is essentially a 30% damage reduction that has no cooldown and I can have it up any time I want to for a total of roughly 50% uptime, which translates into close to 70-80% uptime for when I'm actually tanking. As you can see from the paladin's hits, his SoTR is *always* up - well, almost: the one time it was down and he took a full melee he died.

We wouldn't, which for all we know is the point. However we can assure that we have enough EH to survive the hit and then instantly heal it all back.

The problem with this is that you're -not- just taking Explosive Slam damage. There are other sources of damage going on in the fight ... some random anima dot, maybe you missed an anima font, or more unavoidably, an interrupting jolt happens at roughly the same time and aligns a fair number of times:

This is just in half of a pull too, there's usually 5-8 such close alignments in a fight based on rng, of which you'll probably expect to take 3-4 of them (our poor DK tank has to take them all since he gets to tank a massive full time.)

Can you tell me with a straight face that you're able to take a 600k explosive slam, followed or preceded by a 350k interrupting jolt (both pre-mitigation) within a second or two, a melee swing in there somewhere, and expect to consistently survive as a bear? I guess if you're a far better player than I am, you'll watch the jolt timer and explosive cast and adjust your major cooldowns on the fly to have survival instincts up for two of them, call out for pain suppression/chi coocoon/guardian spirit for others, etc. But again, how is this fair on the bear vs just having a major cooldown/shield barrier up for every single slam and never worrying about random other stuff?

Quick comment: with the 5.3 buff (assuming hotw and weapon swap) it'll be closer to 8 million healing (~300k per person). Less if you're geared for stamina (or haste or mastery).

Fair enough, I usually use my HoTW for damage to stay competitive with other tanks and plenty more select NV, so it's a possible choice for an extremely strong tranq, I'll give it that.

And the skull banner was only 8 mil? Dammit, I must've remembered Gondlem's numbers then, ffs.

2) This is my preferred suggestion, though it might be completely unfeasible. Break each boss hit down into smaller hits, specifically for bears. Imagine a boss auto attack which hits for 200k. Current mechanics are that the bear would either dodge and take nothing, or would take the 200k. Likewise, any other tank either takes the 200k, or operates on some sort of mitigation mechanic. Instead, what if bears had that attack broken down into 5, or 10 smaller attacks, each at 40 or 20k respectively. Then each 20k attack is given an independent chance to hit the bear, at the relevant dodge ratio. Thus, rather than a decision about 200k, we have a decision about 10 separate but simultaneous instances of 20k. This would allow for the RNG of bears to be FAR less severe. Of course, it could still just so happen that all 10 instances of the 20k hit - but far far less likely. In fact, they'd probably need to nerf savage defense if implementing this idea.

There's already a mechanic in game that works similar to this - Army of the Dead. While channeling, the DK gains damage reduction equal to his dodge + parry.

While breaking each hit down into 10 pieces would make coding and lag a nightmare even for 5 mans (well, especially for 5mans when you round up 20 mobs at once), mastery could just increase the split of the damage, for example:

Now: Boss hits bear for 200k. You have 60% chance to dodge it, or 40% chance to eat the full attack.
After: Boss hit is broken into 100k/100k. 100k of it has 60% chance to dodge, 40% chance to eat the full attack just like a normal attack. The 2nd 100k is guaranteed reduced to 40k because you have 60% dodge. And of course more mastery would increase the amount of damage split to the guaranteed reduced portion.

That's like saying how is it fair the DoC Feral rotation is so much harder than basically anything else, when people still use it anyway? Because they want to.

Well, the problem is that DoC is a talent that you can swap out for HoTW at any time (I personally used HoTW for 90% of progression last tier on my feral), while you can't exactly just swap out of being a guardian and select your level 90 talent to turn into a tankadin. Shuffling personal cooldowns around might possibly be considered borderline "class flavor", requiring the use of outside cooldowns goes over the line for me. Also, this is somewhat guild specific, but we feed our DK every single available external cd to ensure his slam stacks reset, so I would be somewhat screwed if I had my druid in.

The 2t15 bonus will always be up when you stop dodging hits. Further, T&C will always mitigate the first hit you don't dodge - and it stacks.

Wait a minute ... we're talking about the same 2pT15? the one that increases FR healing? I don't see how it really affects incoming melee hits. And again, you can't guarantee T&C on every single melee hit that connects or even every other hit.

Swap period on Ra-den is as long or as short as you want it to be. There is no tank mechanic that requires (or even encourages) a swap, we simply two tanked it due to the fact that 2 tanks even sharing vengeance will outdamage, outheal, and outcontrol solo tank + 1 dps. If I were playing guardian, boss would be hitting our paladin for 95% of the fight and I'd merely taunt once every 16-20 seconds for one hit to fuel vengeance before pally takes it back.

This is where I feel that the real problem lies! The encounter design is for co-tanks. Guardian druids are outdated in that regard, and are made for off tanking.
The problem with Guardians is not the number tuning. The tuning is done really well and is balanced with other tanks (not pallies). The issue is, that Guardians have a very limited toolkit and have trouble dealing with a lot of existing mechanics.
Yes, druids are perfectly viable to take for hardcore progression (paragon for example), if the second tank is a paladin or some other "can do everything quite good" tank like monk. The issue with Guardians is that they will ALWAYS get to do the easy job on a fight. The "off-tank's" job.

Some examples:
Heroic Horridon.
A druid is probably the worst kind of tank I can imagine for this. The combination of Dire Call, Triple Puncture, and two melee hits will just crush a Guardian. The active mitigation, which guardians have, is quite useless; your maul will maybe absorb half a melee hit. The rest is still perfectly able to kill you. The only way that a guardian would consistently be able to survive that kind of abuse, is with the use of personal or external cooldowns. This requires a whole lot more work for your team. What can you do about this? Oh right... have another tank tanking the boss and BoP his stacks off, while the Guardian does the easy job of tanking the adds.

Tortos.
Bats.............
Oh you did not dodge these 3 hits... well too bad, we will eat you now. Maul is useless on this even. Yes you can keep up savage defence 100% of the time while tanking the bats - It will still be a whole lot more spiky. What do you do? Ahhh... you make the guardian tank tortos himself! Also you hope to hell that the healers are on the ball, as he will be taking 70% of his hp in damage because of bites. A guardian may be able to heal a lot of that back up, but I tell you - it is not fun to heal! Healing a guardian just feels so inconsistent, and it eats a lot more of your mana.

Also Heroic Sha
What would you do with a guardian? Apply a maul before (dread) trash and use savage defence. Then you hope to not get killed! Or.... you just make the guardian taunt for each naked and afraid while your other tank handles the difficult stuff?!

Short: A great guardian druid will not hold you back, if your second tank is one who can block (or stagger or whatever).

I swap adds and boss with my partner on Horridon and can easily survive the triple combo. You should use barkskin for every direcall anyway, and with T&C + Savage Defense, the damage is pretty negligible. During enrage, the rotation of cooldowns, your own and external, and bops if you are lucky enough to have them, make this a breeze.

I tank the bats on Tortos, all you need to do is put on a few bits of stam (trinket, maybe some gems), and this fight becomes a joke.

Heroic Sha, we never killed, but we did have quite a few attempts into the final phase, and I always tanked the boss, while my cotank took the naked and afraids. Our wipes were never due to me dying.

I don't really understand your logic o.O I have maintanked every fight this expansion so far.

PRO TIP for those claiming to have difficulty getting aggro on adds for Horridon: Tank doors 1 and 3, but pull the boss initially, and stand in his double swipe. You will never lose aggro on adds again, and a simple faerie fire will be enough to get any ranged ones to come to you. Alternatively, I have almost a ridiculously boring mobile rotation for the first door: pick up the first two adds, cleave them down with the boss, the first wastewalker hops down, taunt him over to you, when the next two hop down, you can charge the one closest and ff+taunt the furthest...from there you berserk, and then incarnation when the dinomancer hops down to deal damage and taunt any loose adds. For the third door you only need to tank the warlords, and you just kite them along the wall toward Amani while rotating cooldowns. Pretty simple.

While it would theoretically be possible to tank him as long as you managed to stay "ahead" of the incoming damage, I do have to agree with you. It makes far more sense to just swap to maintain a Vengeance stack, and have the other tank take basically 0 damage while you constantly apply T&C on top of their AM.

This is actually very conspicuously disturbing since it unveils an unmit damage vs static reduction scaling problem.

Well, you can see from the kill video in my sig, my vengeance started out around 200k at the start where the boss "only" has 1 mil unmitigated swings and ended up around 400k by the end where the boss has around 2 mil unmitigated swing (the vengeance meter is right under my player unitframe - gotta watch vengeance to abuse tank damage!)

Edit: oh yeah, don't forget that you need savage defense up once every 11 seconds or else his fatal strike will death touch you.

It may not have been balanced, but to be fair.., all they done is separate the cat and bear, you can gear, gem, enchant as cat, but be a highly efficient guardian, there's nothing really umph about being a druid any longer, which is the main reason why I left mine in the dust after clearing t14 normals, it just seemed to bland:-/

Anohoo, ot, if you're really comfy playing a guardian, and your healers have decent reaction should something flop, an all out crit > haste build is far more valuable then a mitigation build in either size of raid, the amount of damage and self-healing / ae healing a guardian can push, is pretty impressive!

I think the biggest, most obvious problem with Guardians right now is the RNG nature of Savage Defense.

I can think of one way to help alleviate this problem, while simultaneously increasing the value of Frenzied Regeneration. My solution would be to have Guardians take a set portion of their damage intake in the form of a very fast ticking dot. This would have to be implemented in a balanced way though, as it has a huge potential of being overpowered. An obvious choice would be to only have this come into play for attacks that would bring you below some specific very low x% health, and then perhaps only for a portion of the damage taken. But I'm sure there are other ways as well. (Perhaps you could add a multiplier to the delayed damage? Sadly I'm not a smart man, so I'm not sure how this should be balanced.)

In short, this would be a crude fix to the major shortcomings of Savage Defense. We'd suddenly have much more control over our active mitigation, seeing as this very fast ticking, very high damage dot would (in theory) force us to keep some rage stockpiled for an instant Frenzied Regen. We'd still be taking huge damage from big attacks, but now we'd simply be given a single second (or what have you) to get off a single Frenzied Regen before we die.

This would reduce the probability of Guardians being instagibbed, by delaying a portion of our spike damage for a very short time. But this would have to be implemented correctly, and most likely not in the incredibly crude form I have suggested above.

Thus, what did happen at times was that despite your dodge chance, each of the thrashes just so happens to hit. This is unproblematic for the paladin; shield of the righteous guarantees the x% reduction. And as for mitigation or soaking, I fear that it will nearly always be preferable to mitigate rather than soak since mitigation is usually less threatening to the survival of the tank.

There is another problem with soaking. It causes the tank to be the sole focus of the healers for 2-3 seconds, 4 if you are 2 healing. This can indirectly cause a wipe because someone else in the raid didn't receive a heal or dispel.

There is another problem with soaking. It causes the tank to be the sole focus of the healers for 2-3 seconds, 4 if you are 2 healing. This can indirectly cause a wipe because someone else in the raid didn't receive a heal or dispel.

Which is again further mitigated by having a paladin through battle healer.

Also, @ Arielle, I like the idea of mastery increasing the partitioning size.

@ kaiadam, This would also help solve the problem, and is sort of a combination of my second and first suggestion, the first which involved some flat damage reduction with some dodge, the second which involved what Arielle called partitioning.

I have to say, the latter idea is however less interesting the the first.

Our main problem is our mastery which is so bad, paladin mastery is just crazy giving them three things at once. More dmgreduction more heal more blockchance. Monks mastery is really strong too.

Our mastery is the worst mastery ingame cause it gets worse the more you have. And we got the part of the paladin mastery as our 2piece t15.

BH gets nerfed and BH beeing 1/3 of a healer I really doubt that. NV got nerfed so hard it was equal to BH last tier on 2-3 target fights. Monk raid heals are stronger than BH especially in 25m. BH is good no doubt but it heals thealmost as much as HotW with tranq in 10m for example.

Doesnt the death touch from ra den apply to all tanks who are tanking the boss. And saying if you dont dodge two melee attacks you die, what about FR and T&C, with your gear T&C uptime shouldnt be an issue, dont know how long you have to tank raden before tankswap but i think it was about a max of 42 seconds of full SD uptime till you need to wait a few seconds. Tanking with a paladin who gives you the shield after tankswap helps alot too.

One mentions druids are weak when it comes to magic dmg, which tank isnt. sotr bloodshield shieldblock dont help against megic dmg either. most classes need to use a CD when it comes to high magic dmg.

everyone is talking about how bad they are on some fights, what about fights like council where other tanks get destroyed by the frost troll, a druid dodges so much and almost never gets bursted, or jikun stacks that apply on melee hit in 10m they do alot of dmg on tanks that dont have alot avoidence jsut like primordius, the add from the dark twin where druid kills add really fast and needs no heal.

And its not like paladins and monks are unkillable, they are just alittle better in some situations than druids, like warriors. Third mogu hc boss (garajail) says hello to Dks, druids are so op with HotW on that fight. maybe they should do something like that some abilities can not be absorbed.

buffing SD would help alot on that fight maybe nerf mastery a bit or it would be to op. T&C stack 3 times as a buff before applying.

What i would prefer is something like this:

Passive shield: When berserk or (the thing where we get 10 rage and 10 in 10sec dont know what its called in english)is active, your FR no longer heals instead it will shield you for 50% the healing normally done. In addition you SotF, Incarnation, and treants get an extra. SotF while passive shield is active it will shield you for 60% of the healing normally done. Incarnation activates your passive shield ability for 10 seconds. Treant, when your Trean despawns our you sacrifice it you will get a shield with X%(dont know how much HP cause i never even skilled them) for 5 seconds. The shield can only absorb physical dmg

NV got nerfed so hard it was equal to BH last tier on 2-3 target fights.

NV's heals actually got buffed.

Regardless of how well you tank Ra-Den there's still a chance - like 3% or 4% - that you will take 2 back to back swings to the face and die. Kinda like what could randomly happen back in TBC where you could take a string of Crushing Blows to the face and die almost instantly.

I swap adds and boss with my partner on Horridon and can easily survive the triple combo. You should use barkskin for every direcall anyway, and with T&C + Savage Defense, the damage is pretty negligible. During enrage, the rotation of cooldowns, your own and external, and bops if you are lucky enough to have them, make this a breeze.

I tank the bats on Tortos, all you need to do is put on a few bits of stam (trinket, maybe some gems), and this fight becomes a joke.

Heroic Sha, we never killed, but we did have quite a few attempts into the final phase, and I always tanked the boss, while my cotank took the naked and afraids. Our wipes were never due to me dying.

I don't really understand your logic o.O I have maintanked every fight this expansion so far.

I did not say that Guardians cannot tank those fights (or others). I said that they require MUCH more work from your healing team (coordination mainly) and from the tank himself. The fact that it is possible for you can maintank every fight doesn't change the fact that it's harder for you to do so than a tank of another class (with your same skill).
Looking at guardians in a vacuum:
A great guardian is viable and will not be the main reason for wiping. However, he needs to min/max his cooldowns and abilities far more than other tanks in order to remain viable. (T&C+Savage defence for all of horridons punkture's. Neglible damage if you dodge some hits. RNG)
A bad guardian will be far worse than other tanks in most situations (a bad dk takes second place).

A guardian compared to other tanks is about the same as a melee dps compared to a ranged dps.
Just as melee dps, guardians are not bad number wise; they just do not have the tools to perform just as well in real scenarios.

While progressing your goal as a raiding guild should be to minimize chance to wipe. To minimize randomness. A guardian is just not a great tank for this, as they are build around luck. The only ability that will reduce damage 100% of the time is T&C. I, personally hope for some ability to controll your damage intake. Maybe some activateable ability which makes your frenzied regeneration put up an absorb shield in stead?

guardians are fine for 10 man (they can actually be 'strong' on some fights due to HOTW healing allowing you to drop a healer, like on h megara for rampages), but in 25 man bosses hit tanks much, much harder than in 10 man and it makes it not worthwhile to put up with TnC/dodge rng.

a big part of the problem is that frenzied regen is a heal and not a bubble, so you can't pool your resources to avoid getting killed by that one big hard hit every encounter has (triple puncture, megara breaths, talon rakes, whatever). you have to survive it then you can help topping yourself back off (which really doesn't matter, when a tank's health spikes that low you're getting tons of heals coming in from the healers anyway).

Our main problem is our mastery which is so bad, paladin mastery is just crazy giving them three things at once. More dmgreduction more heal more blockchance. Monks mastery is really strong too.

Our mastery is the worst mastery ingame cause it gets worse the more you have. And we got the part of the paladin mastery as our 2piece t15.

Pretty sure armor is designed such that X amount of extra armor gives you the same additional EH no matter what your current armor is at, and druid mastery is basically armor. Napkin math put monk & druid mastery within spitting distance of each other on a mitigation basis iirc. The prevalence of RPS builds sort of de-emphasize that though.

BH gets nerfed and BH beeing 1/3 of a healer I really doubt that. NV got nerfed so hard it was equal to BH last tier on 2-3 target fights. Monk raid heals are stronger than BH especially in 25m. BH is good no doubt but it heals thealmost as much as HotW with tranq in 10m for example.

What ... the ... hell? It depends on the fight, but paladins are generally worth 60% of a healer overall and monks are 40-50%. A lot of those are self heals though, and the paladin definitely self heals more than the monk so it ends up roughly equal how much they heal the raid. We mathed it out for progression and either tank indeed healed for about 1/3 as much as a healer does onto the raid. We're usually both the highest healer for ourselves, being 25-40% of our healing received. NV isn't anywhere close as strong as that. HoTW with tranq is an extremely good burst heal but overall, it's not that high. If you want actual numbers, for our farm kills on Tuesday from heroic Jin'rok to Dark Animus, our paladin tank averaged 62k hps, I averaged 56k, and our actual healers averaged 83k, 92k, 82k, 75k, 91k, and 76k.

Doesnt the death touch from ra den apply to all tanks who are tanking the boss. And saying if you dont dodge two melee attacks you die, what about FR and T&C, with your gear T&C uptime shouldnt be an issue, dont know how long you have to tank raden before tankswap but i think it was about a max of 42 seconds of full SD uptime till you need to wait a few seconds. Tanking with a paladin who gives you the shield after tankswap helps alot too.

Fatal strike will deathtouch you if you don't have an AM buff up. I mentioned it because there was some theorycrafting going on about using FR after each hit or some such which you can't really do if you're tanking the boss for any amount of time. Tankswap is however long you wish it to be. I brought up Ra-den because there was some noise about how bears are the best autoattack tanks or whatnot due to SD - and maybe we are, if the hits are insignificant and damage is averaged over time ... but then you're basically saying that druids are the best tank for trivial content. Ra-den isn't the only example of heavy melee damage, there's plenty of other examples in this tier that will gib your druid in 2-3 hits where other tanks can absorb 3-4 or sometimes 5, he just exemplifies how poor our AM is.

One mentions druids are weak when it comes to magic dmg, which tank isnt. sotr bloodshield shieldblock dont help against megic dmg either. most classes need to use a CD when it comes to high magic dmg.

DP is 40% reduction every 30 seconds. AMS is 100% reduction every 45. Shield barrier is a very large absorb for 60 rage. Guard is a 100% reduction every 30 seconds. Not to mention divine shield or diffuse magic or zen med etc. Yes I'm aware that we have barkskin and SI and last stand ... but so does every other tank, or at least something that works similar.

everyone is talking about how bad they are on some fights, what about fights like council where other tanks get destroyed by the frost troll, a druid dodges so much and almost never gets bursted, or jikun stacks that apply on melee hit in 10m they do alot of dmg on tanks that dont have alot avoidence jsut like primordius, the add from the dark twin where druid kills add really fast and needs no heal.

And its not like paladins and monks are unkillable, they are just alittle better in some situations than druids, like warriors. Third mogu hc boss (garajail) says hello to Dks, druids are so op with HotW on that fight. maybe they should do something like that some abilities can not be absorbed.

First of all, being super good on a fight is nice, but it does NOT make up for being bad on others if your concern is progression. Even if druids are actually better on council (which you can't really say they are because they sort of trivialize one mechanic on normal mode), it doesn't make up for them being very poor on so many other fights.

"almost never gets bursted" - that's basically the problem right there. Other (non-dk) tanks never get bursted. Druids almost never get bursted. That's the inherent weakness of SD.

Heroic Sha, we never killed, but we did have quite a few attempts into the final phase, and I always tanked the boss, while my cotank took the naked and afraids. Our wipes were never due to me dying.

Spikey damage to tanks can and does causes wipes even if the tank doesn't die. Maybe yours was an obvious DPS issue, but to use Horridon as an example if the raid is not receiving timely dispels and heals a spikey tank can be the cause of the wipes without ever dying.

I only made the comments because you said Guardians were forced to OT those fights.

Originally Posted by teddabear

Spikey damage to tanks can and does causes wipes even if the tank doesn't die. Maybe yours was an obvious DPS issue, but to use Horridon as an example if the raid is not receiving timely dispels and heals a spikey tank can be the cause of the wipes without ever dying.

It was typically dps. Not the lack thereof, but more so that we only had two days worth of attempts on the boss before the patch came out, and we hadn't had time to really hammer out a solid strategy - also people stopped really caring since they only wanted to focus on the next tier. My cotank is a DK, and we determined he was much worse on the boss. If you want to talk about spikey damage, then take a look at DKs. The healers beg me to tank fights over him >< Then again, maybe it's just him xD

Pretty sure armor is designed such that X amount of extra armor gives you the same additional EH no matter what your current armor is at, and druid mastery is basically armor.

Correct.

NV isn't anywhere close as strong as that. HoTW with tranq is an extremely good burst heal but overall, it's not that high.

Also correct. NV usually reaches between 10k and 15k HPS on a given encounter - depending on Vegeance mainly. It's incredibly good while it is actually active, but it's just not active 100% of the time. That's why I'm interested in making LotP to not be the throwaway ability it is now.

I brought up Ra-den because there was some noise about how bears are the best autoattack tanks or whatnot due to SD - and maybe we are, if the hits are insignificant and damage is averaged over time ... but then you're basically saying that druids are the best tank for trivial content. Ra-den isn't the only example of heavy melee damage, there's plenty of other examples in this tier that will gib your druid in 2-3 hits where other tanks can absorb 3-4 or sometimes 5, he just exemplifies how poor our AM is.

FWIW Ra-Den isn't a representative example of future content and shouldn't be taken as such. There is a very real possibility that the problems we've identified with Tooth & Claw will be addressed in 5.3. We'll see.

DP is 40% reduction every 30 seconds.

Important to note that this is only if you somehow manage to generate and spend 45 HP in 30 seconds - assuming you start with 5 - which I don't think is actually possible even during Lust/Hero.

this thread just makes me think they should do the idea i had back in beta.. make SD 25-30% more dodge but 10-15% damage reduction. That plus our armor should make us on par with other classes' active mitigation during meaningful events.